Friday, July 29, 2011

Here’s another of my memoir poems from my unpublished collection A Home for the Seasons about the happy times I spent at the home of my maternal grandparents when I was young. This poem describes a hot summer day when my cousins Karen and Joyce and I ran through the sprinkler in my grandparents’ yard. (Note: Dzidzi was my grandfather.)

BACKYARD MERMAIDS
by Elaine Magliaro

An August afternoon,the air hangs over us like a moist veil.A cicada stings the silence.Dzidzi turns on the sprinkler.Thin ribbons of silver beadsstream upward, glisten in the sun.We run back and forth through the tiny waterfall,our bare feet squishing through wet grass,liquid diamonds cooling our sunburned skin,seaweed hair clinging to our heads and necks.We are mermaids of the deepand the sun, a giant topaz,floats above us in a sea of sapphire blue.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Yesterday, my husband and I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see Dale Chihuly's exhibit "Through the Looking Glass." I am so gald we did. It was like visiting a beautiful wonderland–one created in the imagination of glass artist Chihuly. Fortunately, I was able to take pictures without a flash. Maybe you’d like to come along on a tour of Chihuly's glass art exhibit.

Friday, July 22, 2011

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting as much in recent weeks as I normally do. I have a couple of projects that I've been working on that I have to complete soon. There’s also another reason. I’ve been trying to spend as much time with my daughter Sara and her husband as I can before Sara has her baby. My first grandchild is due by the end of July!

Sara sent me a pre-birth picture of her baby from her cell phone the other day. Seeing my grandchild’s face was a thrill indeed.

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Looking at that picture brought back memories of the day my Sara was born…of my only child as an infant and toddler.

Sara on her third birthday

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My daughter is a social worker—like her husband. She is the most amazing adult. We have a wonderful relationship.

Sara & I on Mother's Day 2011

I’m posting one of my favorite poems by Naomi Shihab Nye today. I included it in a memory book that I made for Sara when she was graduating from high school.

What is Supposed to Happen
By Naomi Shihab Nye

When you were small,we watched you sleeping,waves of breathfilling your chest.Sometimes we hid behindthe wall of baby, soft cradleof baby needs.I loved carrying you betweenmy own body and the world.Now you are sharpening pencils,entering the forest of lunch boxes, little desks.People I never saw beforecall out your name and you wave.

Friday, July 15, 2011

Last Friday, I posted a poem titledFireball about one of my favorite kinds of candy—when I was a kid. I got quite a response. It seems the poem brought back memories of childhood for some of the people who commented about the poem.

I admit that I had a real sweet tooth when I was young. There was a little candy store about a two-minute walk from my house. In my mind today, I can still see the glass case in the store that held all the candy bars and dozens of different kinds of penny candies. I could buy a lot of sweets with a dime back in the 1950s. Candy bars were just five cents. I loved Sky Bars and Malo Cups and Mint Juleps and Squirrel Nuts…and so many other kinds of candy.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of an early summer evening when a few neighborhood friends and I sat around the stone fireplace that my father had built in our backyard and toasted marshmallows. Back when I was a kid, Campfire Marshmallows came in a little white boxes wrapped in a blue and white paper--not in plastic bags.

Sitting on a crate with my friends just after the sun went down, I enjoyed watching the outsides of the marshmallows blistering and browning. I love biting into the toasted marshmallows as the semi-liquid insides oozed out. Yum! Pure joy for someone with a sweet tooth.

I tried to capture that marshmallow-toasting moment when I wrote the following poem for my unpublished collection of candy poems.

TOASTING MARSHMALLOWS

By Elaine Magliaro

I piercetwo candied clouds…a pair of whipped sugar pillows with a wooden stick,toast them over the campfiretill they’re warm and brown and their insides ooze sticky white lavawhen I bite in.

NOTE: I also did quite a bit of research on the subject of sweets when I wrote the poetry manuscript. I included factual information along with the poems. I thought some of the information that I found was really interesting.

MARSHMALLOW
Marshmallow candy was eaten in Ancient Egypt. It was once a honey-based candy with nuts that was flavored with the sap of Althea officinalis, a perennial mallow plant that grows wild in marshes in Europe and Asia. Today, the marshmallow candy we eat is made from sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, water, and starch. Sometimes vanilla and other flavorings are added.

Several weeks ago, I read some interesting news about a “not yet published” picture book titled Go the F**k to Sleep. The book had begun climbing Amazon’s best-seller list on the strength of preorders that people had placed. According to an article in The New York Times, neither the book’s author Adam Mansbach nor his publisher could account for the “phenomenon.” Galleys of the book had not been distributed. The only people to have seen the work were, purportedly, “a handful of booksellers who received a PDF via e-mail.”

It appears the PDF of Go the F**k to Sleep went viral. Some of the booksellers who received the PDF of the book must have forwarded it to other people…who probably forwarded it to still more people.

Go the F**k to Sleep is a picture book that is not intended for reading to children. It was written for weary parents who lose patience when their young children don’t want to go to bed.

It seems the book has become all the rage. Even Rachel Maddow designated Go the F**k to Sleep a “Best New Thing in the World” on one of her recent shows on MSNBC. Touré, a writer and cultural critic who is the father of two young children, called it an “awesome” book in an appearance on the Dylan Ratigan Show. And actor Samuel L. Jackson recorded an audio-book narration for it. Jackson said that there were times in the past when he was exasperated with his daughter and told her to “go the f**k to sleep.” Nice way to speak to a young child, don’t you think?

Here’s how the text of the book begins:

The cats nestle close to their kittens now.The lambs have laid down with the sheep.You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dearPlease go the fuck to sleep.

Maybe I’m an old fuddy duddy. My opinion of the book is different from that of Maddow and Touré. In my opinion, Go the F**k to Sleep is not awesome. While I laughed when I first heard about the book, I found the rhyming text tiresome after the first couple of pages. I got the joke. I thought it wore thin quickly.

What I wonder about is how many mothers-to-be and parents of newborns will receive this book as a gift. I wonder how many parents may now think it’s cool to tell their wee ones who don’t feel like going to bed to “go the f**k to sleep.”

Listen to Samuel l. Jackson’s reading of the book and let me know what your opinion of it is.

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I would like to recommend several fine picture books to read to children at bedtime.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Please leave the URL of your Poetry Fridaypost in the comments. I'll be rounding up the links throughout the day.

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Poetry Friday: Morning Edition

Award-winning poet Julie Larios has an original poem for us today at The Drift Record. She says it’s in the spirit of summer’s blowziness and her grandson’s current love affair with the sprinkler. It’s titled Undone by the Sun.

Right here at Wild Rose Reader, I have an original candy poem titled Fireball. It just might will sear your poetry taste buds.

Mary Lee has a post titled Seeing Instead of Just Looking about the “beauty in the ordinariness of life” at A Year of Reading.

About Me

I worked as an elementary school teacher for more than three decades and as a school librarian for three years. I also taught a children's literature course at Boston University from 2002-2008. I served on the advisory board of the Keene State College Children’s Literature Festival from 2006-2008 and as a member of the NCTE Poetry Committee from 2009-2012. I am now retired and write poetry for children. "Things to Do," my first children's book, will be published by Chronicle Books in February of 2017.